What Facebook’s Millionaires and Billionaires Are Doing With Their Money

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Facebook went public back in 2012, which probably didn’t mean a whole lot for your social-network experience, but was a pretty big deal for a select few investors and employees. Like an approximately millions and billions of dollars kind of big deal. Since then, Facebook’s gone on to make a few other lucky folks very, very rich, largely thanks to well-timed acquisitions.

MarkZuckerberg

Notable Spending: Just this week, Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced that they plan on curing disease. Like, all of them! Over the next decade, Zuck and Chan have pledged to donate $3 billion to “cure all disease.” Sounds like a great plan, especially when you compare $3 billion to NIH’s annual budget of $30 billion. Also, he recently paid to have a giant wall put up around his Hawaiian home. Which really pissed off his neighbors.

PeterThiel

Notable Spending: Thiel is a prolific philanthropist, but his most notorious venture so far involved secretly (and then not so secretly) funding wrestler Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker Media, which had criticized Thiel’s hedge fund and publicized that Thiel is gay. The money was well spent, from Thiel’s point of view, since Gawker Media declared bankruptcy earlier this year and was purchased by Fusion and renamed Gizmodo Media Group. In addition to his anti-blog crusade, Thiel’s spent money on floating libertarian paradises with the Seasteading Institute and attempted to pay people to not go to college. Most fascinating, he’s also hung up on the idea of living forever, and had expressed interest in parabiosis, in which an older person is injected with the blood of a younger person. Being a billionaire sounds fun!

DustinMoskovitz

Notable Spending: Moskovitz, unlike Luckey and Thiel, would prefer that Donald Trump not end up in the White House. He donated $20 million to Democratic groups this year, including the Hillary Victory Fund — an enormous sum of money that makes him the second-largest donor this election cycle by disclosed donations. No word on if any portion of those millions were put toward meme promotion. We can only hope they paid for that Pepe explainer.

EduardoSaverin

Notable Spending: Saverin, who renounced U.S. citizenship to avoid U.S. taxes, founded private-equity firm Velos Partners in 2013. Among the firm’s investments: Hampton Creek, home of the world’s only Big Mayo scandal.

PalmerLuckey

Notable Spending: Luckey was recently revealed as the money behind the Nimble Foundation, a social welfare 501(c)4 nonprofit dedicated to shitposting in real life in support of Donald Trump’s run for president. So in other words: funding dank memes. As for how he got wrapped up in the meme business, Luckey told the Daily Beast, “It went along the lines of ‘Hey, I have a bunch of money. I would love to see more of this stuff.’” Stuff.

KevinSystrom

Photo: Bloomberg/Getty Images

Founder and CEO of Instagram, acquired by Facebook for $1 billion in 2012

SherylSandberg

Notable Spending: Sandberg donated $31 million worth of Facebook stock in 2015 to charities, including Lean In, the nonprofit Sandberg founded to help women in the workplace.

ChrisHughes

Photo: Bloomberg/Getty Images

Co-founder

Net Worth: $450 Million

Enemies: Republicans, a changing publishing industry

Notable Spending: Most memorably, Hughes purchased The New Republic magazine for a reported $2.1 million in a dramatic move that inspired many, many think pieces; this year, Hughes sold TNR in a slightly less dramatic move that inspired many, many think pieces. Meanwhile, he also helped fund his husband Sean Eldridge’s run for Congress in 2014, which Eldridge lost by 29 points.

YuriMilner

Notable Spending: Milner’s spent a lot of money on aliens. Or rather, the pursuit thereof. In 2015, he donated $100 million to Breakthrough Listen, an organization devoted to finding “evidence of civilizations beyond Earth.” (Along with Milner, Stephen Hawking and Mark Zuckerberg round out the organization’s board of directors.) He also funds the Breakthrough Prizes, dedicated to advances in various scientific categories.

JanKoum

Photo: LLUIS GENE/AFP/Getty Images

Co-founder of WhatsApp, acquired by Facebook for $22 billion in 2014, Board Member

Notable Spending: Koum has about $550 million in a fund dedicated to charitable giving, but doesn’t seem to have given much of it out yet. He has given $1 million to the FreeBSD Foundation, dedicated to open-source software.